Weekend #23 of 2014 is looking like a pretty typical $149 million for the top 12 films this weekend, within 1% of the norm for this weekend and 4% above the same weekend last year.   Opening at over 3,000 theaters Friday (well above the 2,886 average theater count for opening weekends the last two […]

Now 19 full weeks into 2012, year-to-date domestic box office is now running 21% ahead of last year’s pace and now 17% ahead of the comparable period’s average for the last several years.   Marvel’s The Avengers turned in $103.052 million in its second weekend, a mere 0.1% below what Disney estimated Sunday morning and only $1 million away from the ShowBuzzDaily […]

World Cup 2014 continued Friday with a well-rated match on ESPN Friday at 3 pm (Netherlands versus Spain), which averaged 3.1 million viewers of any age and a 2.09 rating with men 18-49, well above the ESPN average for Group Stage matches in 2010 (2.1 million total viewers and 1.47 men 18-49 rating) and slightly […]

  The thing to remember, when charting the collapse of THE OFFICE, is that the producers weren’t taken by surprise.  Steve Carell made it clear early last season that he wouldn’t be returning, and the show had months to plan for his departure and The Office 2.0.  The abject failure that resulted is a remarkable […]

Ratings for Thursday’s matches on ESPN and ESPN2 are in and of course the Germany vs USA match was the highest-rated match of the day, but only the third-highest USA match in World Cup 2014 because ESPN rated 187 minutes for the entire coverage (pre-match, post-match, halftime and the game itself) instead of the usual 150-minute […]

  Anyone who saw the ONCE UPON A TIME pilot and thought the series would be worth watching only “if nothing else is on” would surely have to be an idiot–and in this case, that idiot was me.  I couldn’t see how the conceit of a show that intercut between a fairy tale kingdom and […]

Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #27 of 2014 looks like $118 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, even worse than the $126 million estimate yesterday, now 31% below the norm for this weekend, and well below the $153.2 million weekend for the top 12 the last time July 4 fell on a […]

    THE NEW NORMAL:  Tuesdays 9:30PM on NBC   WHAT IT’S SAYING:  A new kind of family sitcom:  gay couple, surrogate mother, her daughter–and her bitchy, bigoted (but, you know, funny) grandmother.  Grandma’s practically Sue Sylvester!  And what a coincidence, Sue’s creator Ryan Murphy is behind this too.